"I suppose there is a theme to my puberty list that could be summed up as “Live Free or Die Trying.” There is no battle for liberation, no desperate struggle to be seen on your own terms, that does not owe a debt to this film. Such sentiment is delivered romantically, tragically, and with unbearable beauty in this grande bataille, the likes of which you can still feel all over France, all over the world"

"When I first read Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I was some years away from being married, and still a few years away from imagining I ever would be. What did the adulteries and suicide of a doctor's wife in provincial France matter to me? A lot. As my first editor once said to me, "I've known a number of adulterous women." (I didn't doubt that he had.) "But the one I know best, and will never forget, is Emma Bovary.""

"For when you need to see courage in action This is historical fiction about the occupation of France during World War II, and it’s hardly light reading. But it sure is gripping. It will transport you to another time and place so completely, you’ll feel like you lived it. And even though it’s maybe the last book I’d normally think of as vacation reading, it's a page-turning read about courage in action. Something we could all use right about now."